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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25574206">a breaking fall</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elendraug/pseuds/Elendraug'>Elendraug</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Homestuck</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Ablution Traps, Epilogues-adjacent, Established Relationship, M/M, Panic Attacks, Post-Canon, Trust, references to canon-typical suicide and violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 02:55:35</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,268</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25574206</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elendraug/pseuds/Elendraug</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>this is my time with you; I'm not giving it back.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Caliborn/Dirk Strider</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>25</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>a breaking fall</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I've been consistently 10% of the dirkuu tag on here for like the last five years</p>
<p>happy anniversary of [S] Caliborn: Enter</p>
<p>♫ <a href="https://youtu.be/U5_W4g09ERo">christine fellows - trust | the last one standing</a><br/>♫ <a href="https://youtu.be/TbVWE74p9pQ">garbage - we never tell | strange little birds</a><br/>♫ <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shIA4E2-exU">spoon - nobody gets me but you | transference</a></p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <hr/>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p>
    <em>no one gets what I've done<br/>
everyone else seems to look through it<br/>
oh, but maybe I've never wanted them to<br/>
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shIA4E2-exU">couldn't count on it anyway</a></em><br/>
</p>
</div><hr/>
<p></p><div class="center">
  <p><em>“Writing is putting one’s obsessions in order.”</em><br/>
—Jean Grenier</p>
</div><hr/>
<p>The bathtub was not built to accommodate two people, but they’re accustomed with the world being an ill-fit for them at the outset. Caliborn’s shoulders are slighter, if only slightly, and he’s made a spot for himself between the spout and the shelving, where the tub’s deeper and warmer by a scant few degrees. Their legs are interlocked as Dirk sits opposite, leaning back at the far end, sunk down further to keep himself submerged as the surface slopes away from his chest.</p>
<p>“I’m not usually one for baths,” Dirk says, lifting his left hand to brush his damp bangs away from his eyes. “More of a showers guy, but at least when a body of water is localized within your own place, you get some say in its parameters.”</p>
<p>“Right. It’s tough to adjust the temperature of the ocean.” Caliborn shifts his right leg to graze the gold of his prosthesis against Dirk’s skin. “Unless you’re operating on an interplanetary scale.”</p>
<p>Dirk lowers his hand back below the water to settle on Caliborn’s sunken, synthetic shin. “I’d rather just be rid of it, y’know? There’s no novelty when your planet’s flooded.”</p>
<p>“<em>Avant toi le déluge</em>.” Caliborn rests his hand on his own knee with his fingers outstretched. He touches his clawtips to Dirk’s fingernails. “Afterword, who knows.”</p>
<p>At that, Dirk meets his gaze directly and smiles, sure of this surety. “Yeah.”</p>
<p>They still themselves until the surface calms from their movement, until the lack of commotion allows each visible ripple to be traced back to its source, with the expansion and contraction of their lungs in the humid microclimate contained behind the shower curtain. Datasets are clearer without distraction, with a friendlier signal to noise ratio, with the action easily attributed to the actor so long as there’s no churn to obfuscate who’s at work underneath it all.</p>
<p>Dirk laces his fingers with Caliborn’s and raises their linked hands out of the space he could liken to a gravity well, as he breaks the surface tension, as he envisions escape velocity.</p>
<p>“When you’re soaking like this,” Dirk begins, examining where these efforts have already helped loosen the expired remains of renewing scales, “do you ever think about all these past layers of yourself you've shed?”</p>
<p>“I mean. You're doing it too.” Caliborn rubs his thumb over Dirk’s index finger, between its first and second knuckles. “Just so constantly and piecemeal that you don't notice.”</p>
<p>“True.” Dirk watches the way water runs over his arm, the paths pseudorandom, all ultimately returning to the same source as they drip down. “The whole ‘seven to ten years’ is something of a myth, unless you want to get into telomeres.”</p>
<p>“I don’t.” Caliborn blinks away condensation that’s coursed towards his eyelashes. “Round it up to eleven.”</p>
<p>“We’d have to round down now, wouldn’t we? It keeps happening.” </p>
<p>“What, time?”</p>
<p>“Yeah.”</p>
<p>Caliborn meets his gaze, flicks his tongue, tastes the scent of soap in the roof of his mouth.</p>
<p>“Nothing lasts forever. No stories or skin cells are neverending.” Dirk’s features are shadowed by the shower curtain, accentuating the circles under his eyes, as he keeps his hand elevated and his head just shy of slipping beneath the surface. “If you refuse to prune a plant when its branches are dying, you’re not doing it any favors. You’re just making it less likely for the whole organism to survive.”</p>
<p>“It’s a matter of taste. For vegetable matter, or otherwise.” Caliborn tightens his hold on his hand.</p>
<p>“It’s acknowledging cellular senescence. It’s what wards off carcinogenesis.” Dirk closes his eyes, breathing steam. “I wish I could make them understand sunk costs.”</p>
<p>“Not everyone knows when to cut their losses. Not like we do.” Caliborn nudges Dirk’s leg with his prosthesis. “You can lead horses to water, but you can’t make them drink.”</p>
<p>Dirk’s hair floats at the edges of his throat, spread out from his cervical vertebrae where they’d so often been severed somewhere after the atlas and axis, splitting between C1 and C7 to take a weight off his shoulders, to remove himself from the situation when there were no other ways out.</p>
<p>“Think it over.” Caliborn follows the slide of Dirk’s skull on the incline of the tub, of his chin as he tilts it up to ensure his next exhalations are in the air, of his hair as it bunches behind the nape of his neck. “You have to become at ease with the forces of inevitability.”</p>
<p>“I'm not as patient as you.” There’s tension at his temples, at his furrowed brow even with his eyes shut. “I can't just trust that things will work out. I need to guarantee it or I can't relax.”</p>
<p>Caliborn holds his hand steady and smiles, sympathetic to his stress. “Have you ever relaxed?”</p>
<p>Dirk sits up abruptly, restless in every sense of the word, overstimulated by the sensory overload of liquid heat and extended physical contact. He draws the shower curtain back, averse to the immersion of privacy theater, and allows the steam to escape, leaves water sloshing in a waveform in his wake.</p>
<p>There’s no motion to restrict his movement as Dirk sits instead on the edge of the tub, sidesaddle, with wet feet treading sodden impressions of his presence that will linger in the mat after he’s made his exit. </p>
<p>Caliborn counts the twelve ticks of his thoracic spine like clock indices spaced across hyperbolic sine, studies the light on water droplets that shift as Dirk does, that rotate through the room’s reflected decor as an array of chromachrons.</p>
<p>When they depart, the drain will siphon it all to a single point as the big crunch of their personal microcosm. With Caliborn seated it’s all too easy to envision a childhood nightmare of being discarded bodily along with it, to throw out the artwork with the bathwater. There’s a distortion, cognitive catastrophizing of the symbolism and significance, of a fixation on the two of them, both named for blades, and the fear of loss engraved into the double-edged sword of this memetic disease called friendship.</p>
<p>The relative cool of the ambient air makes him shiver; even tepid-ass water feels cold in contrast to sustained submersion, in the gradual increase of intensity. Showers staved off any complacency, safeguarded as a liminal space for traversing Derse, for spacing out and timing out when he abandoned sleep and chose instead to wakewalk. With his warning he could confront her threats made against his dreaming life, but the danger’s resurfaced with this encroaching cosmology, and despite his efforts, fidelity to detail disappears into the flattened narrative, as she’s collapsed it all into sheer spite.</p>
<p>He’s felt it before, strung out and spaghettified like taffy stretched too thin, the storytelling dragged out and pulled apart, frayed and forever hovering in suspended animation of others’ ideas of who he should be, paused at the event horizon for all observation, unable to reach any conclusion except through reclaiming his death through his own hands, his only recourse to send a message when all other communications have been cut off, even through puppets.</p>
<p>“It’s too much,” Dirk says, a synopsis of distress, distilled into this statement. “This is how they boil you alive.”</p>
<p>“I love you.” Caliborn finds his hand and clasps it gently. “Nobody gets me but you.”</p>
<p>Dirk finds his stability within his grasp and smiles wearily. “Well, who needs them, anyway?”</p>
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